Houlton KOA, ME
Houlton, ME is about 4 miles from Canadian border and in the middle of potato farm country. It’s beautiful, with rolling hills and forests, though I’m yet to see a moose, regardless of all the warning we saw. The campground is lovely, large grassy sites and beautiful nature trail around it through meadows along some woods. The couple that runs it, David and Michelle, has been super helpful and friendly, including trimming the trees by our site.
I love the open spaces here, just grass without gravel or concrete. The nature trail is mowed as well, with large beautiful meadows and even rows of Christmas trees. We walk it almost everyday, it’s an easy mile plus and it’s good to be in the woods. Since it’s holiday weekend, we have neighbors, very nice folks, all local within 1-2 hours. We chatted about travel and visiting different places. It was interesting to hear their take on New Jersey, they actually enjoyed it though everyone mentioned traffic, and jug handles (WTF?), not surprisingly.
We’ve visited Tom’s family, his uncle Ron, in Presque Isle, about 35 miles north of our campground. Tom’s mom grow up here, on a potato farm ,and it was good for him to reconnect. The town is relatively large, with University of Maine and international airport. But since it’s pretty far north, I can’t imagine how cold it gets in winter time.
There’s a golf course Tom decided to play called Mars Hill Country Club . It’s tucked into a side of mountain ridge, there’s a ski resort near by, BigRock Mountain, and large wind farm on the ridge. It’s almost surreal to look up and see the huge arms of the windmill right above you. And yes, they do make a noise, a sort of a whoosh. We saw many wind farms in Maine, and some in NH, I’m glad that they use green energy. The course was great, lots of hills and streams, which made the driving the golf cart a nice challenge. I’m sure getting better at it.
Along Rt 1, there’s a scaled model of the solar system. We did not stop to take pictures, but I saw Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Mars. Pluto is included, as well as the other dwarf planets. Presque Isle has the model of the Sun, right in the University of Maine campus.
We found a very nice place to eat, nothing fancy, just good food. The Rusty Crab in Mars Hill is great and very popular. I had baked haddock, fried oysters and then fried clam roll. Tom had haddock nuggets (sort of like chicken nuggets). Yes, lots of fried seafood, but it was delicious.
Our stop here was primarily as entry into Canada, we will be on our way tomorrow.
